Open Government - public participation strategy: advice

Recommendation 6

Encourage collaboration, partnerships and trust between sectors

Joining up sectors of interest by encouraging partnerships and collaborative working practices will avoid duplication and competition, and ensure that funding can be focused beyond communities of place to include communities of interest and identity.

Integration and coordination between governments to avoid duplication and effective use of resources. To build a common infrastructure going forward we have to prioritise a way to avoid duplicating costs, information provision, network membership, facilitation. Instead of investing in high cost experiments, we should adopt more mainstream approaches. To build on the current community and social action momentum, key messages must be amplified across sectors, making strategic and co-ordinated links. A common approach and language must be adopted to ensure all parties understand the scope of what is taking place and how engagement activities will be used.

Local Authority responses such as that of Renfrewshire offered a ‘super service’, drafting staff from other areas into help with humanitarian effort. This service redesign meant that those answering the phone could adapt to the needs of those calling, speaking to them, referring them across services which included community hubs. A similar response was taken up by Three Towns Community Hub, in North Ayrshire. Councils were viewed as responsive, knew their community better and provided a better service. Following the immediate crisis, staff were relocated to test and protect services and strategic and business recovery. This creates a closer network within community development where Local Authorities and council staff are visible and reportedly more fulfilled by their role at work (Coutts 2020: 19). Coutts (2020:30) says ‘It highlights again how siloed our public sector is and how we could achieve so much more if performance management, operating incentives, and career reward structures were altered to support partnership working’.

We have to build those local trust relationships as well as working relationships: ‘Once we've got those systems in place you then just call on them to help you through whatever the next crisis is, as opposed to trying to invent them on the hoof’ (Fiona Garven). It is important to note that while some local partnerships were strong and relationships were good, and there was exemplary community action and response, in other areas the response was weak, and communities will have suffered as a result.

Further work in collaboration needs to be done with the public. It is time to think of citizens as partners or power-sharers in political decision making and to demonstrate the Scottish Government’s commitment to listening to the public through an effective feedback loop on a fast progressing public policy issue. As Stephen Reicher rightly comments– ‘Government’s ability to listen to the public is a form of strength and crucial to good leadership’.

Following a two-pronged engagement process that engages citizens quickly and effectively but set longer term more reflective groups that can think longer term. When it comes to long-term input from citizens on crisis management and planning, citizens need to work closely with experts and policy makers to ensure that their inputs are valued, but similarly so that decisions made by the government are accepted and adhered to: ‘ask citizens to work closely with experts and policy makers, as equals rather than add-ons - and as collaborators of long-term planning’ (Lightbody 2020). Those engaging need to see themselves in what is produced as a consequence of their engagement.

Action

• Link volunteer and community groups on the ground who can identify and draw together various community action groups or hubs who are doing things^[10]
• Join partners together, signpost where resources are, institutionalise this response to all councils and LA so in the crisis, this response can happen faster and across all regions.
• Make sure the information already acquired by various third sectors, local authorities and community workers is pooled and applied to an action plan.
• Pay community workers, community researchers and members of the public who are dedicating their time to increase learning and knowledge
• Bring members of the public and community responders into decision making through expert groups, participatory and deliberative processes, and evaluation processes to review Covid response.